A delicate white oilstick marking on the side of a boxcar depicts the profile of a man with a hat. Text below it reads “Widely Unknown.” buZ blurr’s drawing is a fitting caption to the re-sourcing of materials, space, reputation and memory evident in the work of the ten artists brought together for this exhibition. Originally conceived as a showcase of painters practicing in Northern California, Widely Unknown developed into an exhibition about process, craft, storytelling, and passage and included artists working in Arkansas, Ohio, Oregon and New York. Artists gathered here were particularly interested in the paradox of technology: excessive disuse in the midst of a frantic recuperation of old-time Americana. Widely Unknown was dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001). The graceful tenacity of Margaret’s work was the inspiration for this assembly of artists.

Nick Ackerman records memories alongside estimations of personal philosophy and its temporary resolution through color, gesture, and surface. Ackerman is involved in the language of abstraction, each surface the culmination of layers of memory; layers of paintings realized then scraped away as a new reality congeals on yet another surface.

For 30 years, buZ blurr has been marking railroad boxcars with word and image, and since 1975, recording these phrases represented by the book hoohoohobos/fortuitous logos (1984). A rail/mail artist, blurr’s text ranges from social critique to the mundane with entries such as “Phoenix, Az,” “dixie fluxus,” and “Rosalea’s Motel.” His mail art incorporates photographic portraiture, the physicality of photographic negatives, and the democratic movement of images.

Bill Daniel has recorded many of blurr’s drawings as he traverses the countryside investigating, documenting and participating in contemporary American folk culture. Daniel’s multimedia installations feature film footage of the far reaches of the American landscape and its inhabitants. For Widely Unknown, Daniel created a multiple projection installation and environment that elaborated on the anonymity and impermanence of boxcar culture.

Cheryl Dunn’s photographs explore motion to suggest a correlation between morality, desire, and citizenship. Created as part of a larger video installation project examining the lives of two men from opposite realities in the Wall Street neighborhood, Dunn’s images choose to expand upon the dehumanizing conditions of modernity while conveying the haunting vulnerability of her citizenry.

Found wood and paper form the structural backbone of Chris Johanson’s ruminations on the human condition. Aware of and sympathetic to the fragility of his fellow man, Johanson’s drawings often portray figures in the act of self-revelation. His elaborate installations transform detritus into transportation lines, buildings, and natural landscape, while seemingly whimsical characters walk, ride, collapse and levitate like Prozac zombies on the verge of transcendence.

Enormous letters drawn freehand on the wall imbued with the artist’s physicality, imperfections in line and shading evidence a human touch. In Margaret Kilgallen’s world, things once again took time. Everything made by hand. Everything in relation to the scale of the human body. According to the artist, her repertoire of symbols, typefaces, words and icons constituted a wardrobe, their juxtaposition simply her choosing, her fancy, their personal significance often veiled, perhaps a sentimental reference to a passerby, a community, or a compliment.

Direct propositions of texture and line, Alicia McCarthy’s works possess the honesty of pure gesture combined with the penetrating exactitude of an etcher’s mark. McCarthy’s works are often executed on wood and feature woven planes of line and color or an obscured spectrum of color emerging through layers of darkness.

Barry McGee has long been concerned with the many codes of urban architecture as revealed in painted, scratched, and inhabited surfaces. McGee has perhaps become best known for his wall painting, a hybrid performance recalling acts of graffiti, self-naming, endurance, and the claiming of territory. Elaborating on his recent installation at the Venice Biennale, for Widely Unknown McGee exceeded the confines of the wall to address the objecthood and nomadic architecture of a cargo van.

In 1999, filmmaker Manny Miranda recorded 11 days of Margaret Kilgallen’s installation process in preparation for her first solo exhibition at Deitch Projects. The work was shot on 16mm time-lapse film with a bolex camera (supported by banjo music selected by Kilgallen) and suggest the seemless flow of the painter’s hand and the narrative logic behind Kilgallen’s fastidious vision.

Eamon Ore-Giron painted a daydreamer’s Arizona replete with golf courses, taxidermied prey, pre-Hispanic dancers, and smorgasbords: space as an organic body. Through these images Ore-Giron contemplated the layers of experience embodied in a place and how that place both retains and exports its essence through its inhabitants.

The work of Rigo 01 engages man’s imposition of order through systems of knowledge, architecture, society and aesthetics through a visual language influenced by comics, traffic signs, photography and the changing urban environment. Rigo is particularly interested in the goings on of the street, occasionally adding his own public works directly into the cityscape: two dimensional monuments to the things, ideas, and sometimes individuals overlooked in the evolution of modern spaces.

Through her music (Peggy Honeywell), animation (The Manipulators, 1999), and painting, Clare Rojas created the magical cast of characters that people her fantastical world of images and sound. Rojas’ gouache paintings on board possess a darkly mythical quality, an intimate tragic: a hand emerges from a boiling cauldron; a boy is entangled with a snake as he floats down a milky white river. Rojas’ storyboard-like works are sweetly sad, their haunted images linger on the mind.